Farmers to be Paid to Stop Cows Farting? New Carbon Credit Plan Floated.

Canadian farmers could soon be enjoying a lucrative new income from their cattle, if plans for a new “carbon credits” scheme are successful.

CBC News is reporting that Cedric Mcleod, an agricultural economist and founder of Mcleod Agronomics. is being paid by a private research institute to measure and record the “greenhouse gas” emissions of selected Canadian farms with a view to try and reduce them, and sell the difference as “carbon credits”:

MacLeod hopes to have a clear picture of the gas profile of New Brunswick dairy farms by the end of the year and will rank them from worst to best by comparing to a baseline from previous years.

“Then we’ll be able to say, ‘Look, on these 50 dairy farms, we found say, you know 100 tonnes of carbon credits per farm, times 50, there’s 5,000 tonnes of carbon. Who’s interested? Who wants to show some corporate responsibility?’

“And throw those out on the market and see if we can stimulate something.”

Carbon credits could be a new revenue source for the farmers, said MacLeod.

As a scientific report for the private institute notes, the possibility of selling carbon credits from reducing “emissions” from dairy farms is a win-win situation as bigger, more efficient farms will reduce their emissions naturally, so being paid on an ongoing basis for this is a huge added bonus.

Funding for the research carried out by the private institute was provided by the Canadian Government through the agency of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

Farting is something cows do, but belching is a far more voluminous activity. It is a consequence of turning human-inedible food into things of more use to us. Othewise all that grass just turns into you know what, through death and decay.

Agri-feed companies may not be disinterested here. In the 1990s, when I worked in the chemical industry, an enzyme was developed for animal feed, one of the features being reducing flatulence. So most of the financial benefits of reducing emissions could end up going to big business rather than farmers.